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“Parents ‘vindicated’ after police admit unlawful arrest over WhatsApp row”, the Guardian reports. The subheading is “Hertfordshire police agree to pay £20,000 to Rosalind Levine and Maxie Allen, who were held for 11 hours after complaining about daughter’s school”.
I posted about this couple’s experience last April: Boiling frogs in Salem and Hertfordshire.
One aspect of the story that the Free Speech Union’s Frederick Attenborough highlighted at the time was that Hertfordshire Police didn’t just put the frighteners on Rosalind Levine and Maxie Allen, they also threatened – in writing – their local county councillor, Michelle Vince, that if she continued to advocate on their behalf she too might find herself “liable to being recorded as a suspect in a harassment investigation”. And they told Michelle Vince to pass on that warning to the local MP, Sir Oliver Dowden.
As Sir Oliver said in the Times, “Police risk ‘curtailing democracy’ by stopping MPs doing their job”.
Today’s Guardian article continues,
Allen claimed he and Levine were not abusive and were never told which communications were criminal, saying it was “completely Kafkaesque”.
A Hertfordshire police spokesperson said: “Whilst there are no issues of misconduct involving any officer in relation to this matter, Hertfordshire Constabulary has accepted liability solely on the basis that the legal test around necessity of arrest was not met in this instance.
“Therefore Mr Haddow-Allen and Ms Levine were wrongfully arrested and detained in January 2025. It would be inappropriate to make further comment at this stage.”
You wish. Further comment is both appropriate and necessary. There bloody well are issues of misconduct involving at least one officer in relation to this matter; whichever officer tried to frighten off both a local councillor and an MP from representing their constituents.
The sudden resignations this week of BBC director-general Tim Davie and CEO of news Deborah Turness has focussed minds on the role of the media. It has been startling – and grimly predictable – to watch senior figures at the BBC scrambling to defend their failures by muttering darkly about ‘right-wing conspiracies’ and ‘inside jobs’. Few, if any, have paused to consider whether the real problem might be their own cowardice.
The same rot runs through mainstream media across the world. In Ireland, I’ve met too many well-paid figures at RTÉ, the Irish Times and the Irish Independent who seem serenely proud of their refusal to touch anything remotely controversial. I call it Hugh Linehan syndrome, since, as duty editor of the Irish Times and host of the popular Inside Politics podcast, he appears to be particularly self-satisfied, even self-righteous, about his ability to avoid difficult issues.
– Stella O’Malley
In a series of reports, I have shown that the European Union already operates a vast propaganda and censorship apparatus that spans every level of civil society — NGOs, think tanks, the media and even academia. The cornerstone of this system is a network of EU-funded programmes — notably CERV (Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values), Creative Europe and the Jean Monnet initiative — that collectively funnel billions of euros into organisations that are, in theory, “independent” but are in fact deeply enmeshed in the Brussels machine.
– Thomas Fazi
“Hurricane Melissa a ‘real-time case study’ of colonialism’s legacies”, writes Natricia Duncan for the Guardian. The subheading is “Destruction in Jamaica shows why climate justice cannot be separated from reparatory justice, campaigners say”.
The article starts with a sympathetic couple of paragraphs about the history of Gurney’s Mount Baptist Church, a church whose roof was ripped off by the hurricane.
The names of past members are still etched into its walls and the “freedom stone”, built into its structure to commemorate the end of slavery on 1 August 1838, is still there.
As church and faith groups play a significant role in Jamaica’s recovery, the loss of the building and parts of the adjacent school are a huge blow to the community, Rev O’Neil Bowen told the Guardian.
I find that sad, and I hope this community gets some help to rebuild after the hurricane. Though I have a low opinion of the long-term efficacy of taxpayer-funded foreign aid, and think it is actively harmful when it encourages a dependency economy, if we must have it, let the money be spent on helping victims of natural disasters like this one. I think a lot of people feel the same way.
But may God preserve Rev. Bowen from some of the people who want to help him.
At the ongoing UN Cop30 climate change conference in Brazil, campaigners say that devastated regions such as Hanover as well as others across Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti, are stark examples of how African descendants are disproportionately affected by centuries of environmental degradation.
Speaking from Cop30, Jamaican economist Mariama Williams said historical injustices must be confronted and addressed.
“The research shows that wherever Afro descendants are located, they are most vulnerable to climate and environmental impact and have been suffering from historical environmental injustice and climate injustice,” she said. “Climate justice cannot be separated from reparatory justice. The same systems that enriched the north created today’s vulnerabilities.”
The Global Afrodescendant Climate Justice Collaborative, where Williams is a senior adviser, is among hundreds of human rights groups and environmentalists that urged Cop30 to put reparations on the agenda.
In their open letter they argue that “global warming began with the Industrial Revolutions that were made possible by the resources provided by imperialism, colonialism and enslavement, [and] that colonialism and enslavement skewed the global economy in favour of the material and financial interests in the global north”.
You know what will happen? The people from governmental, inter-governmental and so-called Third Sector aid organisations that victims of natural disasters in the Caribbean deal with most often talk like Mariama Williams and her white counterparts. They, the victims, will pick up the impression from the Climate Justice people that the way to get financial aid these days is to talk like this:
“We’re not begging these countries. This is a debt that is owed. And I think this needs to be made clear. And this is why there is very deep connection between calls for climate reparations and reparations for slavery, because they’re both connected through these longer histories, these colonial legacies,” he [Arley Gill, a member of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) Reparations Commission] said.
In 2020, two thirds of Britons supported cutting the foreign aid budget. I doubt the British people have warmed to it since then. But if giving taxpayer-funded aid to poor countries is unpopular now, wait till you see how unpopular it will be if it is packaged as punishing ordinary British people for a small fraction of their distant ancestors having owned slaves. I predict that even private donations will become more scarce the more often reparations are mentioned. Oh, and they’ll never get the reparations.
The ideological divide within MAGA has grown increasingly harsh. Trump is not, at heart, a professional politician. Rather, he is a blend of New York developer and carnival barker. His uneasy alliance with ‘tech bros’, Wall Street insiders and fervent right-wing nativists was never stable. It was held together mostly by Trump himself – and by the awfulness of the Democrats.
Even as he strikes a populist pose, some people influential in MAGA flirt with ideas like eugenic Darwinism and a permanent ruling aristocracy. Others within MAGA embrace isolationism and attacks on minorities, particularly Jews. Trump rejects such notions, but too many top GOP figures, argues Senator Ted Cruz, seem terrified of alienating the odious Tucker Carlson to do so.
– Joel Kotkin
This tweet from “GnasherJew” includes a video clip from a lecture on “The Birth of Zionism” given by Dr Samar Maqusi for the group “UCL Students for Justice in Palestine” on 11th November 2025. Dr Marqusi is currently Research Associate at University College London’s Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory (PEARL). (“Her work looks into the politics of space-making inside the Palestine refugee camps. More recently, she has been investigating modes of sociality and vitality in refugee camps inside a burdened Lebanon. Previously, Samar worked with UNRWA (UN Agency for Palestine refugees) as an Architect/Physical Planner, focusing on programmes of shelter rehabilitation and camp improvement.”)
Update: It looks like I pressed “publish” too soon. Never mind, you can enjoy seeing this post made in real time. Watch the video clip. It shows an academic in University College, London (UCL) spreading the blood libel. For anyone new to the term, a blood libel is a specific sort of anti-Jewish propaganda in which Jews are said to have murdered Christians for ritual purposes, often including baking their blood into bread. The genre goes back to the thirteenth century cult of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln. The spreading of such tales is usually the precursor to a pogrom, as it was in Lincoln in 1255.
Dr Samar Maqusi said this to her students the day before yesterday:
Now 40 years later, in about 1838, there was something called the “Damascus Affair”. Uh, what happened is, there is, um, a priest, a Christian priest called Thomas. He disappears, um, in Damascus during what is called the feast of Tabernacles. So, this is a Jewish feast, and the story goes – and, you know, again, these are things that you read again and again. As I said, do investigate, draw your own narrative. But the story is that during this feast they make this, um, special pancakes, or, um, bread. And part of the holy ceremony is that drops of blood from someone who’s not Jewish, which the term is “gentile”, has to be mixed in that bread. So, the story is that, um, a certain investigation was undergoing to try and find where Father Thomas is. He was found murdered and a group of, of Jews who lived in Syria said that, you know, admitted to kidnapping and murdering him to get the drops of blood for making, uh, the holy bread.
This one is known as “the Damascus Affair” or “the Damascus Blood Libel”. It’s famous enough to appear in lists of historical blood libels. I wasn’t expecting to see it related as fact in 2025 in one of the top ten universities in the world. Like every conspiracy theorist ever born, Dr Maqusi peppers her speech with literal and metaphorical “uptalk”, little get-out clauses such as “the story goes” and “draw your own narrative”, so that if challenged she can claim to be “just asking questions”. But she felt safe enough to speak as she did, and, with the delayed exception of whoever recorded her, her student audience did not challenge her.
As ever, I do not seek to use the law to silence Dr Maqusi. I want it made clear to all how common and accepted her views are among the pro-Palestinian movement, and among Palestinians. I do think that unless UCL takes action their Equality, Diversity and Inclusion policy will be revealed as an empty sham, but if that is the case I would rather know about it.
Update: Dan Souter points out in the comments that UCL has apologised and Dr Maqusi’s profile has been removed from the UCL website. The link is to an article by David Rose in Unherd. I commend the Provost’s decisive action to protect his university’s reputation, but I do find it disquieting that in just five years universities across the English-speaking world went from beating their breasts in penitence for the most minuscule and indirect manifestations of racism – here is UCL’s 2020 statement on Black Lives Matter and here is an account from its website of how it “denamed” buildings named after a couple of Victorian eugenicists because seeing the old names has “a profound impact on the sense of belonging that we want all of our staff and students to have” – to this.
That is certainly one way of putting it. Another is that, first, the Trump stuff is much less important than the BBC’s issues in other areas and that it seems modestly significant that Goodall devotes almost no space at all in his lengthy Substack piece to any of those issues. Secondly, at no point does Goodall bother considering whether some or any of the criticisms made by Prescott and Grossman have any validity at all.
That, however, seems a necessary starting point.
News judgement is often a nuanced and complex business. News “values”, on the other hand, should be comparatively straightforward. This is where it is entirely reasonable to convict the BBC’s coverage of the sex & gender wars. For here the corporation largely – though with notable exceptions, especially Hannah Barnes on Newsnight – picked a side and chose the one that required BBC journalists to sacrifice their judgement. Ideology trumped basic news values. They said it was dry when in fact it wasn’t obviously dry at all.
For once again, among the most important of those values is this eternal question: Is This True?
– Alex Massie
There is blood in the water and the sharks are circling. This story is going to run and run and run 😀
As for its content, Simpson’s post summed up the BBC on several levels. Firstly, that its most senior journalists are simply unable to see the world as ordinary people see it. Politically motivated attack? Mate, the BBC literally edited footage. This was no innocent error; as Janet Daley put it, this was “a professionally crafted editing job which has to have been designed to produce a calculated effect for a political purpose”. Your bleating is only making it worse.
Secondly, that the BBC considers a Left-of-centre worldview to be the definition of objectivity. The Guardian is its ideological ally because both assume they are the privileged holders of sanity, grown-up thinking and the truth, which must be defended against the fascist hordes. When the chips are down, the BBC won’t even bother to hide it.
Thirdly, that any criticism of the broadcaster represents a bad-faith attempt to destroy a great socialist project that aims to redistribute the news to each according to his needs. Here lies the kicker: in pushing such a conspiratorial Leftist worldview, the doughty journalists of the BBC have apparently dispensed with the need for evidence.
– Jake Wallis Simons (£)
The day before yesterday I wrote, “Remember the names of those public figures, especially journalists, who say that this was acceptable behaviour by the BBC because it was done to Trump. These people think lying is acceptable. Assume they are lying to you; assume they would lie about you.”
One example is Adam Boulton. He is the former political editor of Sky News, among many other prestigious roles, and currently presents on Times Radio. Regular readers may recall that in 2023 he told BBC Newsnight that GB News should be shut down in order to protect the UK’s “delicate and important broadcast ecology”. Boulton’s response to the crisis at the BBC was this tweet:
Adam Boulton
@adamboultonTABB
For the record No words were put into Trump’s mouth. The quotes were him saying what he said.
9:36 AM · Nov 9, 2025
(Hat tip to the science fiction author Neal Asher.)
People in the replies to Boulton’s tweet have a lot of fun snipping out parts of what he said in order to reverse its meaning. But it is not really that funny. Leading journalist Adam Boulton thinks deliberate, carefully engineered selective quotation is an acceptable journalistic practice. Leading journalist Adam Boulton thinks lying is acceptable. Assume Adam Boulton is lying to you; assume Adam Boulton would lie about you.
Another journalist whose own words demonstrate that he thinks it is fine to use selective quotation to lie to his readers is Mikey Smith, Deputy Political Editor of the Mirror. Back in the days when he was Michael Smith, Mikey worked for Sky News and the BBC. On November 9th, he tweeted this:
Mikey Smith
@mikeysmith
It’s not an assault on the BBC. It’s an assault on facts.
The edit was only remotely a problem if your position is that Trump played no part whatsoever in encouraging January 6th. Which he plainly and obviously did.
7:37 PM · Nov 9, 2025
Leading journalist Mikey Smith thinks deliberate, carefully engineered selective quotation is an acceptable journalistic practice. Leading journalist Mikey Smith thinks lying is acceptable. Assume Mikey Smith is lying to you; assume Mikey Smith would lie about you.
Still, perhaps I was a little harsh about journalists in general in my earlier post. Sure, there are plenty of outright liars in the media, and plenty of people who upvote their lies and beg to be lied to some more. But perhaps a larger group is made up of caring, intelligent people who you’d probably really like if you met socially, in the unlikely event that you were invited to one of their social gatherings.
People like Jane Martinson. She is a Guardian columnist, a professor of financial journalism at City St George’s and a member of the board of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian Media Group. On November 9th she wrote this piece for the Guardian: “The BBC is facing a coordinated, politically motivated attack. With these resignations, it has given in”
Now the resignations of both Davie and the CEO of BBC News, Deborah Turness, have shown that baying for blood gets results.
The biggest shock is that this saga began just a week ago with the leak of a 19-page “devastating memo” from Michael Prescott, a former political journalist who spent three years as an external adviser to the broadcaster, published in the Telegraph. The dossier alleges BBC Panorama doctored a speech by Trump, making him appear to support the January 6 rioters, that its Arabic coverage privileged pro-Hamas views, and that a group of LGBTQ employees had excessive influence on coverage of sex and gender.
I admire in a technical sense the way that Professor Martinson uses the word “alleges”. The claims that the BBC’s Arabic coverage privileged pro-Hamas views and that a group of LGBTQ employees had excessive influence on coverage of sex and gender can be fairly called allegations. Even if one thinks these two allegations are probably true, as I do, whether the behaviour of groups of journalists over a period of years was fair or unfair is not a matter that can be assessed quickly at a distance. Two of the three items in Professor Hutchinson’s list of things that she says the dossier “alleges” truly are allegations, i.e. claims that remain to be proved. The first one is the cuckoo in the nest. Professor Martinson also categorises it as an “allegation” that Panorama misleadingly edited Trump’s speech. If she had wanted to, she could have verified the allegation as fact by watching a twenty-three second video. That particular clip was from news.com.au, but it is widely available. (I suppose we could enter a spiral of distrust and say that maybe that video was faked like the Panorama one, but that would involve admitting the Panorama one was faked, so this option is not available to Professor Martinson.)
Now, Prof. Martinson might complain that it is unfair to focus on that little evasion when later in the article she did go on to say,
None of this is to say that the BBC has not made mistakes. At the very least, the Panorama documentary appears to have included a bad and misleading edit of an hour-long Trump speech, which is unacceptable even if that speech was subsequently found to have encouraged insurrection.
But if she did so complain about relevant material being downplayed, I wouldn’t have to go to ChatGPT to find a smoothly written defence of the practice. Notice how even in the act of admitting that the Panorama edit was “bad and misleading”, she still puts in a little doubt that it actually happened. She writes, “the Panorama documentary appears to have included a bad and misleading edit“. “Appears to” – can we get BBC Verify onto that? It might be that Jane Hutchinson wrote “appears to” here and “alleges” earlier as part of a subtle attempt to cast doubt on politically inconvenient facts that she knew were true but would prefer her readers to doubt. However I think it more likely that it was a mere reflex; an involuntary flinching of the eyes and mind away from the thought that a situation could exist where Trump – Trump! – was the one being lied about and people like her were the liars, and, more embarrassing yet, that she and people like her might be the ones being lied to. And that this might have been going on for years, and she, a Professor of Financial Journalism, had not noticed.
Let us finish this discussion with a short prayer for Guardian journalists and those who love them:
“Protect me from knowing what I don’t need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don’t know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen.”
– Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
We must take over the whole of Birmingham, the whole of the West Midlands, the whole of the UK… we will not be taken for granted, and we will win.
– Iqbal Mohamed MP, Jezbollah Party er, I mean “Your Party”
“BBC director general Tim Davie and News CEO Deborah Turness resign over Trump documentary edit”, reports the BBC about itself:
BBC director general Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness resign over Trump documentary edit
It comes after the Telegraph published details of a leaked internal BBC memo suggesting Panorama edited two parts of Trump’s speech together so he appeared to explicitly encourage the Capitol Hill riots of January 2021
In a statement, Davie says “there have been some mistakes made and as director general I have to take ultimate responsibility”
I used the tag “Deleted by the Woke Media” because fifty-four minutes of Trump’s speech on January 6th 2021 were deleted by the Woke BBC, and the trailing ends of the tape spliced together to make it appear as if he had said an inflammatory sentence he never said.
Remember the names of those public figures, especially journalists, who say that this was acceptable behaviour by the BBC because it was done to Trump. These people think lying is acceptable. Assume they are lying to you; assume they would lie about you.
Magatte Wade is an African anti-poverty activist. No, not like you’re thinking – she’s an actual anti-poverty activist. In fact her chosen term to describe what she does is “prosperity activist”.
In a tweet made yesterday, she wrote,
https://x.com/magattew/status/1986537994984058913
The best way to keep people poor:
Convince them their poverty is someone else’s fault and only the government can save them.
I think that is true.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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